Taj Begum was born in 1937 in Delhi to an Urdu-speaking literary family. Her father, born and raised in Delhi, was a landlord and her mother was a homemaker. Sharing the story behind her name, Taj Begum says, “My father says on my birthday King George VI was crowned in England, and therefore he’d decided that my name would be Taj.” Her parents’ marriage was set by her paternal grandfather in Delhi, when her mother was four and a half years old, and her father was six years old. “Several years after her marriage, my mother obtained an English education from Queen Mary School, and could read the English newspaper, and converse in English,” she shares.
Taj Begum is the third of five sisters and one brother, and was raised at her paternal grandparents’ residence in Khari Bavla mohallah and their parents’ residence on Court Road (near Delhi Sabzi Mandi) before Partition. Her paternal grandfather used to own a horse cart, and her parents used to own a car. Her father was avid hunter, and would often to go to Delhi for hunting tigers and deer, and had a great collection of guns for hunting that he’d keep hidden at the basement of the house. “Every week we used to watch him disassemble his guns, clean them, and reassemble them,” she remembers.
Her father had recently built their house on Court Road before her family moved into it in 1944. It had a lawn with a swing for children, a kitchen, and five rooms, with curtains. The rooms of her house were divided into zenana (female-only) and mardana (male-only) sections. Cooking was done by the male cooks in copperware and brassware utensils. “The male cooks were forbidden to enter the living and dining areas without their heads covered,” Taj Begum remembers. “My grandmother had not once heard the crackling of cooking utensils nor had seen cooks make food in the kitchen,” she says. Taj Begum recounts only the elders in her house were allowed to listen to the radio. “In our father’s absence, we would switch it on and listen to songs on it. As soon as he’d return, we’d switch it off, cover our heads, and go back to reading our books,” she recalls.
The police station and vegetable market was close to their house. During Diwali and Gurupurab, Taj Begum and her family used to get sweets from their neighbors. During Eid, Taj Begum would visit her paternal grandparents’ home at Khari Bavla, where the entire family would get together for Eid prayers, and katchoris and vermicelli with milk was made and distributed in the mohallah. In 1942 Taj Begum joined her elder sister at the Saint Mary’s School in Delhi. She says that it was a school run by the nuns. Her most vivid memory from that school was standing in a queue outside the canteen to get their share of breakfast – biscuits and an apple.
At the time of Partition Taj Begum was in 3rd grade at school, and she recounts way the neighborhood changed. “I used to rely on the elders to understand what was going on. There was a family at the vegetable market, close friends of my father’s. The women of that family had not once stepped foot outside their house. One day, they were forced to flee their home, with their children and some of them came to our house for refuge. I used to see them cry and narrate stories of how the English killed one of their sons, and how they saw his dead body on the streets. From the lawn of our house, we could see fireballs flying all over the place. It felt like we were in the middle of some kind of war. The fighting lasted for three days,” she shares.
She remembers that her father asked her mother to cook and gather as much food as possible, as they prepared to leave their home for Purana Qila when neighbors had warned them of a police raid. “Being few in number, the neighbors told our father it would not be possible for them to protect us if such a raid took place,” Taj Begum says.
Taj Begum, her immediate family and her cooks moved on to the Old Fort, while her uncle stayed behind at their home on Court Road. “He had hoisted the flag, and luckily, our house was spared from the violence and destruction we’d feared.” The refugee camp was miserable: “There was no food getting distributed there, and no roof on top of our heads. It was raining. Once we hid under one of the army trucks to avoid getting wet from rainwater. It was the heaviest rainfall I’d seen in Delhi.” Her father had plane tickets to Lahore, but the earliest flight for Lahore was not for another 15 days. “The living conditions at the Old Fort were getting worse, we couldn’t wait that long, so my father wasted those tickets and bought train tickets to Lahore instead.”
Taj Begum remembers the train ride to Lahore. “The berth was literally stuffed with people, and the windows were sealed shut. My baby cousin’s mouth was stuffed with a cloth so that he may not make a sound. Our uncle told us insurgents are sharpening swords on the platform, if we make a sound, they would massacre the entire train,” she shares. It was a 36 hour journey to Lahore via Saharanpur in Uttar Pradesh. Her paternal aunt was living in Lahore, as her husband was posted as a civil surgeon there. After crossing the border at Wagah, Taj Begum stayed with them for a few days, and then moved on to Karachi and settled temporarily with her maternal aunt at a two-room flat on Jacob Lines. Her father was offered an evacuee property in Karachi against their residential property in Delhi. “My father saw that house and noticed half-eaten stale roti and a plate of rotten daal on the table, with a glass of water half-empty, as if the person left his home in the middle of lunch/dinner. He refused to take that house as we also had left ours in a similar state,” she says.
It was difficult to adjust to their new home in Karachi. There were no fans, and the bathroom was filthy. After living at Jacob Lines for three years, Taj Begum and her family moved to a guest house at Pakistan Chowk, and eventually her father built their own house at Nazimabad in Karachi. Taj Begum’s mother struggled in Karachi to find a suitable school for her daughters, and eventually had them admitted to Government School on Jacob Lines. After matriculation, Taj Begum obtained her intermediate and bachelor’s degree from Frere’s College in Karachi in English, Urdu Advanced and political science in 1957, and B.Ed in 1958 from Karachi University. She took up lectureship in Urdu at the Government School on Jacob Lines in 1959. She also taught Urdu and English at the Government School in Nazimabad for a decade. In 1967 she studied for her master’s in Urdu from Karachi University. In 1989 she joined the Government College for Women at Korangi in Karachi as principal, and served there until her retirement in 1997.
She married her husband, author and broadcaster, Dr. Aslam Farrukhi, in 1955 in Karachi. The couple has two sons. Her husband passed away in August last year due to heart-related complications. Currently she lives with one of her sons and his family in Karachi. Since Partition, Taj Begum has not visited her birthplace in Delhi, though she shares her late husband has made sixteen trips to Delhi, particularly to attend the Urs of Nizamuddin Auliya. “More than the love for my birthplace, I have fear of it. I can never forget those awful days of Partition.”

Barbara Anne was born [Antoinette D’Souza] on April 17th, 1939 in Karachi, Sindh to a Konkani speaking family hailing from Goa. Her father was a revenue officer with the Sindh Lands Department, and her mother was a homemaker. Barbara is the third of four sisters and five brothers. “I was delivered by Dr Himal Das at his hospital in Karachi,” she recounts. She was raised in Karachi and in Goa, before Partition. Two of her brothers died in their infancy.
Barbara shares that her paternal grandfather, one of the early settlers in Karachi from Goa, was the first town planner of the Soldier Bazar. “He was born in 1865. His name was Pedro D’Souza. The Portuguese were peaceful people but not progressive. Many Goans therefore moved to Bombay and Africa for better livelihoods. My grandfather opted for Karachi. He came here with a few of his Goan friends towards the end of the 19th century,” she says. “Karachi used to be a dense jungle in those days. He decided to clear some of the area and build a colony there. It was called the Cincinnatus Town. He also laid the foundation for St Lawrence Church in that town. The road that leads to the town was named after my grandfather, after his demise in 1912, in recognition for his services. We used to have our own little house there. My grandfather had a large family of seven boys and three girls that were living there. My grandmother sold that house after his death, and we moved to Saddar where I spent most of childhood years,” Barbara shares.
Her mother used to live in Goa before her marriage. “In those days, the boys in Karachi would travel to Goa to find a bride. They felt their roots were there and fathers would be eager to have their daughters married off to men working in the cities. That’s how my father was married to my mother and they came to Karachi, and settled here permanently.”
Her mother used to take her to Goa to be with her grandparents and extended relatives. “Whenever there was a new baby expected in the family, she would take us to Goa. There were no permits in those days. We would get the ship tickets in the morning, and get on it in the evening. My parents made a lot of new friends in Goa, and they would also visit us in Karachi from time to time [before Partition]. On one occasion, we saw the colorful festival of Holi in Goa, and remember that I was scared of the colored powder people were throwing at each other.”
In Goa, Barbra used to hear conversations of older people, and picked up Konkani from them. “I’m able to converse in the language and sing songs, but cannot read or write it. One of the Konkani devotional songs for the Church she still remembers is “My love, my love, don’t be afraid, I’m not going to leave you.”
Barbara obtained her primary education from St Vianney’s school and high school education from St Joseph Convent for Girls in Karachi. She recounts the system of education at school was based on old-fashioned disciplinarian practices. “They would use the cane if you didn’t study, but it was accepted. The handwriting had to be perfect. You had to be on time and regular. Whatever our teachers said was accepted. Our parents would not take up for us, they would take up for the teachers,” she says.
English, Religion, Geography, Art were curricular subjects she enjoyed whereas Needlework, Sports, Debates and Music lessons were regular co-curricular activities. She borrowed books from her high school library. “The British Council library was at a small distance from school but we didn’t need to go there because the school library had ample number of good books.” At home, DAWN, Morning News and Evening Star were widely read newspapers. Barbara says her father was an avid reader.
Barbara took piano lessons, participated and won in debating competitions. She remembers her father’s help with academics had a major influence on maintaining good grades in school. “He was a strong believer in our education. He would help us with homework and trained me to be a good debater,” she says. Mr Mobad, a Zoroastrian gentleman living close to their school used to arrange movie nights for students of Catholic families at the Paradise House Cinema in Karachi. Some of the films she remembers seeing at the cinema are Heaven Knows Mr Aniston, The Bells of St Mary, Joan of Arc and the Ten Commandments.
At the time of Partition, she had just been promoted to 6th grade, and had started studying History. Barbara recounts that period as ‘the takeover’. “We got these new history books in our class with simplified biographies of Mohammad Ali Jinnah, Jawaharlal Nehru and Gandhi. There was a whole lot written about independence in the book but it was too much for us to grasp, because these leaders had just taken over. I was eight years old. Independence was a big word for me. I grasped some meaning of it when I saw a big procession of Muslims on [Victorian] carries wearing big garlands. Then there was the takeover in Karachi. The British were lined up and handing over administrative affairs to the Pakistanis. Then I saw the coins coming out with the Pakistani flag on them. Before those, we used to have portraits of King George the VI on the coins. I grasped through it all. But I could feel a certain amount of fear, and a certain amount of nostalgia, and a certain amount of people missing something, because they were happy with the British,” she recounts. “I didn’t experience much of the British rule but got feedback very vaguely, and I took it in.”
After Jinnah’s demise in 1948, Barbara witnessed the procession of his burial in Karachi, from her school. She also remembers the assassination of Liaquat Ali Khan the following year, became sensational news at her school and a holiday was declared at the school the next day. “That was very sad.”
After Partition, her mother’s house in Goa was converted into St Xavier School. “It was handed over to Church authorities by one of my uncles, when my mother was no longer living there. I went to see it once. It’s a grand building now but the school administration still calls it Mrs D’Souza’s house.” In 1973, her entire family migrated to Canada and live there nowadays.
In 1961, Barbara joined the St Joseph Convent as Sister. “In those days, it was considered a privilege amongst Goan Christian families to have one or two members become a priest or a nun. Nowadays there is so much of materialism that families are not very happy to part with their children, for religion, because it is a kind of permanent separation from them. I saw my parents for 12 years after joining the Church ministry, and then they left for good,” Her mother passed away in 1992, and her father passed away in 1997.
Barbara also saw the Queen of England taking a walk by herself in Karachi in 1961, during her visit to Pakistan, with General Ayub Khan. “She was just passing down the road in Karachi alone and I caught a glimpse of her, and waved at her. She waved back at me.”
Her final message to everyone is: “Be happy, think positively, and take things in your stride, remembering what you have learnt by way of values, spiritually and culturally.”

Baba Kesho Mal [name at birth Vishnu Mal], was born in 1940 in Rohri, Sindh to a Sindhi speaking family. Father was a dry nuts and sweets shop owner in Rohri and his mother was the homemaker. He is the youngest of an elder brother and sister. Muslims and Hindus were living together in Rohri, he shares. There were 250 Hindu households in the area. Mr. Mal was raised in a joint-family system. His extended relatives lived in Sukkur, and they would frequently visit them. There were several temples in Rohri, Mr. Mal shares. As a child, used to play gilli danda, and flock to his father’s shop in the morning.
They had electricity in Rohri’s commercial areas. At home, they used kerosene lamps and oil lamp. The stars and constellations were used to tell time [sun during the day and stars in the evening].
Partition only reminds him of the fear, panic and emptiness that took over Rohri all of a sudden. “Within days, the city was practically deserted. Nearly all the Hindus in Rohri migrated to India.”
Mr. Mal relocated to Sukkur after Partition, permanently and gave up himself for service to the maintenance and management of Jhulay Lal Mandir in his early 30s. Before that, he served as cook for pilgrims at the temple. Apart from Sindh, he has gone on pilgrimage to Nankana Sahib for Gurupurab.
. He has been living at the temple since Partition, and has never married.

Mai Taji [name at birth Taj Din] was born in 1941 to a Punjabi-speaking family at Daleri town in Amritsar District, Punjab. Their father Muaaz Din was a farmer, and their mother Fazal Bibi was a homemaker. Taji is the youngest of two brothers and four sisters, and grew up at Amritsar before Partition. Sharing their earliest recollections of childhood, Taji says that the agrarian families in their town were engaged in the barter trade where wheat and rice were exchanged amongst them quite often.
The family diet was vegetarian, and brassware was used for cooking and consumption. They used to play the game of Kokla Chapaki with friends in the mohallah from all faiths quite often. The clothing worn at home was plain khaddar, stitched by their mother and sisters at home.
Taji says they must have been six or seven years old when they had to leave their homes at Daleri. “There was an announcement in our area. We were told that anyone who wants to leave for Pakistan should do it now or living conditions could get worse in Amritsar,” They recounts.
Taji says that their family moved to Lahore via the Wagah Park immediately after that announcement. “It was two months before riots broke out in Amritsar and everywhere else,” They says. Taji did not witness any violence and killings himself but recalls hearing stories from elders about what was happening. From Lahore, Taji’s family went to Kana village in Kasur where they settled permanently. Neither Taji nor their siblings obtained any formal schooling, and Taji’s elder brothers became daily wage workers to support the family. Taji’s father died eight years after Partition. After reaching teens, Taji switched to silk wear for attending special occasions like village festivals, melas and weddings.
During the same time, Taji met their first guru. “I found him while buying vegetables at a market near the Kot Lakhpat railway stop. His name was Safdar. He was veterinarian doctor specializing in livestock and cattle, and an army officer. He hired me as his assistant and taught me how to prepare injections for the animals,” Taji says. After spending some years at their clinic, Taji started work at a tandoor where they kneaded dough for rotis, for two decades. They quit the job after developing a form of vision impairment, and have been at their parents’ home in Kasur ever since. They have many followers from the khwaja sira community in Lahore. Taji depends on them for their daily living expenses nowadays. Their mother passed away in the early 1970s. Taji continues to live at their parents’ home in Kani, Kasur, and reverted to male clothing in the late 90s.
Taji believes that the generation today is suffering from a culture of individualized lifestyles. “The isolation and the restlessness we have comes from that culture. We need to bring back the days when it was considered normal for people in one mohallah to get together in one place and share their happiness and sorrows like a joint family system.”
On nostalgia concerning their childhood at Amritsar, they say: “There is nothing compared to memories of one’s birthplace, the home one grows up in, and friends from the mohallah one used to play with. No one wants to be forced out of their houses all of sudden. The pain of losing home is unbearable, especially when we really had no choice in the matter. It makes me very sad to think of our lost childhood, even today.”

Malika Ali was born Malika Hafiz in 1945 at Hyderabad Deccan to a ruling class family hailing from Lucknow. Her mother was the first Muslim woman member of the Hyderabad State Assembly, and daughter of the Nawab of Lucknow. Her father, was a prominent journalist in India before Partition, carried on the same profession after his migration to Pakistan. He was also an advisor on political affairs to the Nizam of Hyderabad. Her maternal grandfather, besides being the Nawab, was a leading lawyer in British India, famous for winning a case against the British defending the Maharaja of the Princely State of Oudh, Mrs Ali recounts. Mrs Ali’s paternal grandfather was deputy commissioner working directly for the British Viceroy.
“In those days, no paper currency was used. Both my grandfathers were paid large sums of money in coins. The coins used to come on donkey carts, and stored in the basement of my grandfather’s palace in Lucknow. The workers would count them all night,” she shares her mother’s memories.
Her mother, she says, was driven to politics and philanthropy from a very early age. “In front of our grandfather’s palace in Hyderabad Deccan, there was Hyde Park which was a popular place for activists to rally together during the Independence movement, and give fiery speeches. In Lucknow, there was a Zenana Park [Ladies Park], where women would gather for political speeches. My mother’s grandmother used to take her to the parks in the evening. The ladies from the leading political parties in India at the time used to be there for meetings and discussions. My mother would sometimes would run to the stage and start speaking. The ladies in attendance were very impressed by her talents.”
“At the age of seven years, she would buy sweets from her pocket money and distribute them to the workers in her house, instead of spending it on herself like the rest of her siblings,” Mrs Ali recounts.
Sharing the unusual causes of her mother’s success in politics, Mrs Ali shares: “My father was the main person to have brushed up her skills. She was engaged to him at the age of seven years, and her rukhsati took place when she was 12 years old. My father was two decades older than her. He refined her public speaking skills and would sometimes write the speeches for her. With her husband’s efforts and help, she had won many admirers before she reached her teens. She was homeschooled and had a great command over the Persian language,” Mrs Ali says. Her mother is also known to have been one of the main speakers at the March 1940 rally at the Minto Park [now Iqbal Park] in Lahore.
Mrs Ali is the youngest of four sisters and four brothers. She was raised at her parent’s home in Hyderabad Deccan before Partition. She migrated to Karachi with her family in 1949, after the police action in Hyderabad Deccan.
“One of my maternal uncles was appointed as the Minister for the Princely State of Patiala, just before Partition. He helped us a lot in moving to Karachi safely,” she says.
In Karachi, they were temporarily settled in the Victoria Chambers on Victoria Road [now Abdullah Haroon Road]. Her mother worked for the homeless refugees coming from India and raised funds to help them resettle in Karachi. “When they used to visit my mother, she used to cry over their sufferings. She went door-to-door meeting with every affluent woman she knew, and with their help, she set up the Women Refugees Rehabilitation Association and helped thousands of people acquire housing, education and jobs. The government had no role in supporting her efforts,” she says.
In 1951, Mrs Ali’s school life began at a Methodist Convent in Karachi. She suffered an unexpected meningitis attack during the course of her studies, and was hospitalized for several weeks. She developed severe visual impairment as one of the side effects. She continued her schooling like any other normal child under her parents’ guidance, and went on to completing her bachelor’s education in 1969. The same years, she was married to her husband, a chartered accountant from Karachi, educated in the UK. The marriage took place in Karachi. They have one son, after Mrs Ali survived eight miscarriages. “I am a miracle of God,” she says lightheartedly.
She accompanied her husband on his official trips to Egypt, Holland, Switzerland and Saudi Arabia. In 1984, she performed Hajj with her husband at Mecca, Saudi Arabia. Her husband passed away in 2011. Mrs Ali lives in Karachi with her son nowadays. She is engaged in various fundraising activities for the repair of ancient mosques in Kashmir, and planning to open a trust in the near future.
Sharing her final thoughts on Partition, Mrs Ali says: “Pakistan came forth because of contributions from the rich families of Jalandhar and Amritsar. As Hindus, Christians, Muslims, Sikhs although we visit different places of worship, we seek the same God. We should fight the devil out and love the humanity, because it’s better to forgive and forget rather than remember and regret.

Salima Hashmi [name at birth Salima Sultana] was born on 14th December 1942 to an Anglo-Indian family in Delhi. Her father, Faiz Ahmed Faiz, was an army officer, poet, political activist, editor of the Pakistan Times, and founding editor of the Daily Amroze. Her mother, Alys Faiz, was a political activist, writer and homemaker.
Narrating the story of her name, Mrs Hashmi says: “The surname is a very Western idea. In our family, we had the tradition of giving a complete name, a first name followed by the second name. My mother liked Rehana, and Sabiha for the first name but my father didn’t approve. He named me after Salimuzzaman Siddiqui, his friend who was a scientist and also an artist. Hence I was named Salima with Sultana as my second name, and my sister was named Moneeza Gul,” she says. Mrs Hashmi dropped her second name, after the expiry of her second passport.
Her father’s family was from Kala Qadar, a village in Sialkot. Her mother’s maternal family was from France, and paternal family is from London, England. Sharing a family lore about her paternal grandfather, Mrs Hashmi says that after a chance encounter with an Afghan trader in Lahore, he rose to prominence from being a peasant of Kala Qadar, to an educated, well-respected and envied treasurer of financial affairs at the Court of the King Shah Abdur Rehman the II, in Kabul, Afghanistan. “There were many controversies and conspiracies cooking up against him. There was an Englishwoman, a doctor, who was in charge of the women of the king’s harem and introducing the small pox vaccine. Rumor has it that she was in love with my grandfather and when she heard about the controversies and conspiracies against him at the harem, she informed him immediately, and he fled to India. Later on, he went on to England to study law at Cambridge. During this time, the Afghan King sent him a proposal to take up ambassadorship of the Afghan government at Queen Victoria’s court in England, which he accepted.
One of the women her grandfather married was a princess of the Hazara tribe. “The novel Vizier’s Daughter by Lillias Hamilton is actually based on the life and character of my grandfather. After completing his studies, he returned to Sialkot and started his law practice. He was a close friend of the poet Muhammad Iqbal,” she says. “My grandmother was the only Punjabi woman my grandfather had married. She hailed from a village in Sialkot, near Kala Qadar. The rest of his wives were Afghans.”
Mrs Hashmi says that her mother’s maternal family had settled in England during the 17th century. Her great grandfather used to own a posh bookshop on Swallow Street near Piccadilly. “The Prince of Wales used to sit there, and buy books from him. After the economic depression of World War I, they moved and settled in East London, where they had to rebuild their lives from scratch. During that time, my mother joined the Communist Party and became involved in the Freedom Movement for India.”
She left London for Amritsar in 1938 where husband of her elder sister M. D. Taseer was posted Principal of the M.A.O. College in Amritsar. “My father was an English teacher at that College,” She says. Mrs Hashmi’s parents were married in 1941.
Before Partition, Mrs Hashmi and her younger sister Moneeza [born in Simla] were raised in Delhi, Rawalpindi, Quetta, Simla, Lahore and Srinagar as a result of their father’s various postings in the army.
Sharing her earliest memories from childhood, Mrs Hashmi says she was two years old when she was with her family in Rawalpindi. “I remember that because I fell and had hurt my head. I was taken into a hospital and given stitches. It was a military hospital. Parents weren’t allowed to stay with the patient but the maids were. My mother asked my paternal aunt to pretend to be a maid, and then she was allowed to tend to me for the night at the hospital. I almost died of blood poisoning because of that injury. In those days, Penicillin was newly invented. My father being in the army had some privileges, so I was given Penicillin and survived.”
Mrs Hashmi’s first spoken language at home is Urdu. “My parents had decided that their child should grow up on one language and that would be Urdu. My mother had learnt Urdu, and she taught me to read and write at our home in Delhi. When my English grandparents visited us in 1947, I couldn’t understand them and they couldn’t understand me. It was at the age of four and a half years, I started learning my grandparents’ native language. My grandmother was fun. She used to tell us stories, and would act for us. She came fully prepared with puppets and things to entertain the children,” she recounts.
In early 1947, Mrs Hashmi was enrolled at a nursery school in Lahore. “I remember my mother telling me it was a Hindu school. Of course I never knew what that meant at the time. I remember going in and playing there. I used to weep copiously every morning when I was sent to school and that continued for most of my life,” she says.
Describing herself as an introvert and quiet person, Mrs Hashmi’s closest friends from childhood were her cousins Mariam, Salma, and Billu [the late Salman Taseer].
At the time of Partition, Mrs Hashmi, her mother, sister, grandparents, maternal aunt and uncle were in Srinagar. “My father, a Lieutenant Colonel in rank, had resigned from the army in February of 1947 and moved to Lahore to set up the Pakistan Times and Amroze newspaper offices. My grandparents had just arrived from London so we had decided to spend the summer in Srinagar. We celebrated Eid there and afterwards, our father sent us a message from Lahore to leave Srinagar immediately as the situation was getting worse,” Mrs Hashmi recounts.
They took a bus from Srinagar to Murree. On the way to Murree, Mrs Hashmi says she saw a bus at Thrait that was full of Sikhs who had been massacred. After reaching Murree, her mother organized the women in a procession to stop the rioting and bloodshed. “I remember she sat me down on a donkey and handed me a white flag. I was the leader of the procession waving my white flag. I was scared of the donkey but at the same time felt proud to be leading a rally of women. There was a certain performance to the role and I really enjoyed it,” she says.
After a day or two in Murree, Mrs Hashmi and her family continued on to the Rawalpindi Railway Station on the bus, and took the train to Lahore. They shared the compartment with another English woman, the artist Anna Molka Ahmed [who founded and headed the department of fine arts at Punjab University] with her daughter.
“There were so many people on the roof of the train. They were from Rawalpindi trying to crossover to India. There was mayhem and crowds, and there was no light in the train compartment,” Mrs Hashmi recounts. “We arrived at the Lahore station, which was under curfew at the time. There was a terrible hush in the city. My father had a curfew pass, so we managed to leave the Station and stayed with Begum Shah Nawaz at Lawrence Road for a while and in the meantime my parents started looking for a place to stay,” she says. They found a grand house not too far on Lawrence Road which is now a Government Office Building. Sharing her memories of her mother’s reactions on visiting that house, Mrs Hashmi says: “The lawn was completely dug out. The house was in bad shape, ruined by the miscreants. The electrical sockets had been pulled out, fans were taken off. There was a prayer room in the house that was defaced and badly desecrated. I remember picking up a children’s comic book from the rubble and my mother snatched it from my hand and threw it down yelling at me: we are not to touch anything here,”
Mrs Hashmi and her family settled in an undamaged upper portion of a well-known doctor’s house on Empress Road and began rebuilding their lives. Recalling sights from the damaged lower portion of the house Mrs Hashmi says that she saw a refrigerator slashed by an axe. Her paternal grandmother had migrated to Gujranwala from Gurdaspur barely escaping the violence, and was eventually allotted residential property in Lahore against the lands she owned in Gurdaspur.
In late 1947, Mrs Hashmi was enrolled at the Convent of Jesus & Mary where she wasn’t allowed to speak Urdu because everyone at the Convent was encouraged to speak English. “The nuns were aghast that I was an Englishwoman’s daughter but didn’t know any English. They refused to let me speak in Urdu and I used to weep and would sit at the edge of the door waiting for school to end. My grandparents used to pick me up in a tonga. I used to rush at the sight of them, I hated that school so much.” She says. 104/2, U B;pvk Ph 2, Street 3,
At home, Mrs Hashmi says that daal chawal had always been her favorite dish cooked by her mother, and mangoes are the love of her life. “She also used to make Irish stew and Shepherd’s pie that I loved. Her specialty was homemade ice-cream, which she made using an icebox when we didn’t have a refrigerator. My mother was always particular about hygiene. I remember she used potassium permanganate to wash the dishes and the clothes to keep epidemic diseases like cholera and dysentery at bay. She was very particular and strict about table manners. That was her Englishness that used to persevere. We always had napkins on the table.” Mrs Hashmi recounts.
In 1948, she was enrolled at the Queen Mary Convent where she studied for three years then moved on to the Kinnaird High School in Lahore from where she completed her matriculation. Despite her inclination towards the arts, Mrs Hashmi derived inspiration from the sciences, particularly Physics.
In 1951, Mrs Hashmi’s father was incarcerated by the Pakistan government. Recalling an incident of her final year at Queen Mary’s, Mrs Hashmi says that she was invited by one of her school fellows to her birthday party. “I hated going to parties but since I had become reclusive after my father’s arrest and no news on his whereabouts, my mother insisted that I should go. I was eight years old at the time. There were some men sitting on the table at the party who started asking me questions about my father’s whereabouts which turned into a kind of interrogation. I started putting on a bravado act despite not having heard from him in three months. I told them my mother has just received a letter from him. I knew I was doing the wrong thing but I was so scared at the way they were interrogating me I told them what they wanted to hear. My mother found out about the incident. She called my school fellow’s family and gave them hell for it. I still remember the way she yelled on the phone,”
In 1956, she opted to study at the Lahore College for Women for her intermediate degree in fine arts and in 1962, she completed her intermediate certification course on design from the National College of Arts in Lahore. In the same year, she travelled to London and studied for a three-year diploma in art education at the Bath Academy of Art in Bristol majoring in photography and painting. In 1990, she completed her MA honors in Art Education from the Rhode Island School of Design in the United States.
In mid-1965 Salima was married to playwright, writer and artist Shoaib Hashmi whom she’d met on several occasions in Lahore and London, due to their overlapping interests in the performance arts. Sharing the tale of her marriage, Mrs Hashmi says. “Our marriage took place after my grandmother’s approval. She had no idea that Shoaib and I already knew each other. She looked at him once and said that he is a nice boy and I should definitely marry him.”
The marriage took place in Karachi were Mrs Hashmi’s parents were living at the time. Mrs Hashmi moved to Model Town in Lahore with her husband after marriage, and lives there today with her immediate family. The couple has one son, Yasser Hashmi and a daughter, Mira Hashmi.
Soon after their marriage the 1965 war had broken out, and Lahore was under curfew once again. “The whole of Gulberg was empty. Most people had run for their lives but we stayed behind. Shoaib used to have a curfew pass. He was doing a program called Parakh, and I was doing a puppet show called Babloo aur Naazi for PTV. During the war, we used to go and do those, and I still enjoy doing that.” she says. “We used to walk around in the darkness with the curfews going on and the noise of sirens. It was a short war but a lot of people died because of it. During this time my father wrote the poem called Blackout.”
In 1966, Mrs Hashmi returned to London where she joined an infant school and invested most of her time on art education for children. In the meantime, her husband took up his studies at the London School of Economics. The couple stayed there for three years. In 1969, Mrs Hashmi took up teaching Fine Arts at the National College of Arts in Lahore whilst continuing to build her team of artists for television shows Mr and Mrs Hashmi were producing together. She also served as the Principal of National College of Arts for four years. She’s organized, curated and implemented several art exhibits and design projects, conferences and seminars in Pakistan and around the world. She also has several publications to her credit.
In 1981, Mrs Hashmi’s husband was arrested and jailed at Kot Lakhpat with 400 people for their progressive views. “It was déjà vu for me at many levels. My daughter was the same age I was when my father had been arrested and the superintendent of the Kot Lakhpat jail where my husband was, was the same jailer during my father’s tenure in prison,” she says.
In 1955, Mrs Hashmi visited her birthplace Delhi with her father during the Asia Writers’ Congress organized by the Indian Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru. Her father was the head of the Pakistani delegation. “I remember we went across Wagah on foot and then went on to Amritsar by train where we had lunch. We arrived in Delhi and met with friends from pre-Partition days. I also remember meeting Nehru,” she says.
In 1962, Mrs Hashmi revisited Delhi with her mother to watch celebrations of the India Republic Day. “It used to be celebrated with royalty and pomp, with elephant processions and fairs during Nehru’s time,” Mrs Hashmi recounts.
Sharing her final thoughts on Partition, she says: “There is no closure because people’s stories have yet to be properly documented and understood. They were the ones who had to pay the price for a decision in which so much was left to chance, and neither side envisaged what they were unleashing. It was a terrible carnage which was totally unnecessary. The issue of Partition keeps re-emerging with the 3rd and 4th generation today who don’t have those immediate memories but they do carry the stories that were handed down to them.
There are a million ways to look at Partition. Over the years I have heard stories of bitterness, of great optimism, of loyalty and of gratitude. As a child, I’ve heard stories from my parents who witnessed it. My mother worked in the refugee camps. I was at the Lahore Railway Station when a train full of dead bodies had arrived and my mother had yelled at our driver to take me away from that carnage. There was a deathly silence on the platform in Lahore which I understood years later.
My father, even though he was from this side, could not reconcile all his life with the biggest bloodbath in the history of this region. It is evident in the fact that he managed to write only one poem on Partition. It’s these stories that lead us to know why it happened the way it happened.
The fact remains that the British set this up to drive the point home. This was their last good bye to the Sub-Continent. It could’ve been nipped in the bud very easily but they chose to look away when they had the means not to. I feel we really have to accept that there was this separation and we need to come to terms with it if we want to move forward. Otherwise, we are only going to trivialize all the carnage that has happened and it will weigh on our shoulders if we don’t find a way to cope with it.

Syed Nizam Shah was born in Kashmir to a Kashmiri-English speaking family on 25th February 1932. He is from the Naqshbandi family. His father’s family hails from Tashkent and is known to be the founders of the Naqshbandi order of Sufi Islam in Kashmir. There are several shrines of the Naqshbandis still existing in Srinagar today. One of the shrines belonging to his family is the Khankahi Sokhta or Dodmut Khankah [in Kashmiri].
Mr Shah’s father was the first Muslim governor of Kashmir at the time of the Punjabi-speaking Dogra Dynasty in the early 1930s. The Naqshbandis enjoyed an elevated position as a prominent Muslim family and had extensive landholdings spanning five villages. Mr Shah’s father was learned and fluent in Arabic and Persian, considered to be languages of scholarship in those days. They had a family library going back to several centuries of hand written manuscripts and literature. Mr Shah’s mother’s family hails from a village 20 miles off of Srinagar. She was a homemaker. Mr Shah was raised with one elder half-brother and one elder half-sister, and two younger sisters at their residence in Srinagar. His mother passed away three years after his birth. For a while, Mr Shah and his siblings were brought up by an Afghan royal family that was settled in Kashmir. “They were exiled after losing the wars with the British and were allowed to settle in Kashmir by the then-Maharaja. We still maintain ties with that family.” Mr Shah’s stepmother was a Christian woman his father had married after her conversion to Islam.
Mr Shah says that in those days, people in Srinagar used to live in mohallahs. “In our case, the mohallah would comprise of various Naqshbandi families. In the family enclave, we used to have our own mosque called Khosha Sahib which still stands in Srinagar, named after the Sufi saint Khowaja Shah Niyaz. It’s a very small mosque and used to cater to families living in the mohallah. It has some historic relics of Islam there, one of which is known to be the hair of the Holy Prophet Muhammad, gifted to our ancestors by the Sultan of Turkey, on his spiritual expedition to Istanbul. It is displayed publicly on the birthday of the Holy Prophet. It is only accessible to the trustees of the mosque today.” The upper class Hindus – the Brahmins and Kashmiri Pundits – used to have their own mohallahs. There were very few Sikh families living there, and would dine with the Muslims and vice-versa. There was a school for Sikhs built by Maharaja Ranjith Singh. Shia Muslims lived in their own mohallahs. There was no animosity between people of various sects and faiths. There was a lot of respect for Hindu, Muslim and Sikh festivals and under his father’s governorship, they were observed jointly by all communities, as Kashmiris.
Mr Shah was brought up in a mansion in the family enclave with a big garden, he remembers. In childhood he remembers having this love for cars in his family. Most of the growing up years were spent in the gardens. Describing the structure of the mansion, Mr Shah says, “Houses in Kashmir in those days used to have courtyards in between the gardens. My father had built the front portion of the house in the 1920s. My sister, myself, my step grandmother and father used to live in it. My brother and his family had the rear section of the courtyard. Diwali, Dussehra and Eid were celebrated jointly amongst Muslims and Hindus. Wazawan was a special dish made for weddings, cooked only by professionals trained in cooking the dish. White Kashmiri rice with gravy of various types was another popular delicacy.” He says. They had running electricity in Srinagar. They also owned an antique telephone that had the Morse code mechanism. They also owned a radio. The postal system was run by the British. King Edward’s stamp was used on the envelopes for letters. Villages in Srinagar didn’t have electricity.
The rice, maize and corn farms and the peach and cherry orchards supplied food for the household. “We had cows and chickens but no buffaloes. There were no buffaloes in Srinagar. Due to my father’s hold on extensive agricultural property and orchards, our family was self-supporting. We used to grow mainly rice, corn and maize. The water for irrigation was channelized from the mountain stream and wells.”
Mr Shah says that the lands on higher altitudes four five miles from Srinagar would be given to the British army officials and Maharajas from other States on rent during the summer and they would use them to hunt and play golf etc [nowadays the place is occupied by the Indian army].
The famous Nedou’s hotel in Srinagar was owned by his sister. “There was one branch of it opened in Lahore, its name was changed to the Avari Group of Hotels after Partition,” he shares.
Mr Shah was fond of hiking on the mountains and fishing with his father. He played hockey and cricket with his friends. “We had three horses. My sisters liked riding. I hated it.” He says. Some of his closest friends were Hindus, especially the children of Maharaja of Jaipur’s family.
Mr Shah’s father was one of the first Kashmiri Muslims to go to a missionary school [Church Mission School] inaugurated by the Church of England, founded by Tyndale-Biscoe, a Kashmiri Englishman. “It was considered a big event to be enrolled at a missionary school in those days since it used to be the only school where English was taught. The others were typical schools where Arabic and Persian were studied.” Two of his younger sisters were the first from a Muslim family to enroll in a mission school called the Presentation Convent at Srinagar, as well. “That was run by the Catholics and it was the girls’ first English medium school.” He says.
Purdah was not observed in the family which was a breakthrough because of his father’s status. “We were a modern family,” he says.
Mr Shah’s early education started at home. He was taught by an English governess and Muslim cleric. At the age of ten, he was enrolled at one of the branches of Biscoe’s school in Srinagar that was run by his son at the time. Commenting on his father’s knowledge of English, Mr Shah says that it considered a mark of honor and respect even though the British Raj was not in Kashmir. Used to cycle to school frequently, sometimes picked and dropped by father. In those days, it was strictly required by law for bicycles to have a rear lamp reflector, and light in the front that would come on after sunset. “If you were well-off, you would have the dynamo light on your bicycle. One day when I was cycling back home in the dark, the traffic police officer stopped me because my dynamo wasn’t working. He reported the incident to my father and he was very angry and reprimanded me for it,” he recounts. Recalling his schooling with children of different religious backgrounds, Mr Shah says that some students faced difficulties adapting to the school activities. “There were many Kashmiri Pundits in the school and they couldn’t play football with us even if they wanted to. One of the tenets of their faith was not to touch leather since they were made out of skins of cows and buffaloes, like the football,” he says.
In their house there were three kitchens, one for the servants and the maids, one for the family, and one for the guests from Hindu families with a set of cooking utensils and cooks specializing in their cuisine. “As a matter of strict protocol, utensils in that kitchen were never to be used for cooking meat, only vegetarian food,” he says.
Just before Partition, the option available to Mr Shah’s father was to send him to the Doon School at Dehradun in India for higher studies. “He sensed that Partition could stir a lot of trouble because people had already started to evacuate areas amidst rising political tensions. My longtime school friend Karan Singh went on to the Doon School and I was left behind,” he says. In 1946, Mr Shah was sent off to England with a guardian and some Indian students on scholarships. They took to Rawalpindi by road and then took a train to Bombay [now Mumbai]. From Bombay they set sail for Liverpool by sea, and from Liverpool, took the train to London. Mr Shah completed his A Levels from the King Williams College in London.
In the meantime, Mr Shah says that after the takeover of Shaikh Abdulla in Kashmir in 1947 and deployment of the Indian army at Srinagar, hell broke loose in many parts of the State. “My father kept me posted on updates who continued to serve as the Governor of Kashmir during the period of Partition maintaining a neutral stance between Jinnah and Shaikh Abdullah. The Poonch area became a hub of refugees who ultimately migrated to Rawalpindi and Wah Cantonment. My brother was in the civil services of Kashmir, and was attacked by Abdullah’s mobs in Srinagar while he was out running an errand. He fled to Karachi after that episode. Jammu became a horrifying example of ethnic cleansing. The whole exercise was unnecessary. In summary, Kashmir was made the victim of two nationalist ideologies.”
Mr Shah was cut off from his ancestral home and family income at Srinagar during Partition, and he was soon looking for a job in England. “I had just gotten admission into Oxford and the London School of Economics but couldn’t study in those institutions,” he says. In 1950, he joined the British American Tobacco Group that was doing business in Imperial India and in Pakistan.
In 1953, Mr Shah acquired a temporary passport to travel from the UK to Pakistan as a result of his posting at Akora Khattak in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa by the British American Tobacco Group (BAT). We were the first batch of Pakistanis recruited selected by the company on the basis of our strong family backgrounds. During my first posting to Pakistan, I was not acknowledged as a Pakistani citizen. I could use that passport for only three months. For years, I was without a nationality, and this applied to all the Kashmiris in exile. We all lived in this foray of hope that the UN resolution will lessen the tensions between the two countries and we could cross borders, take on a 7-8 hour journey from Rawalpindi to Srinagar by car and visit our ancestral homes. This dream never came true. The Kashmiris who had migrated to Pakistan were considered stateless. They weren’t treated like refugees from India but from a disputed territory with no identity. During the plebiscite, the migrant Kashmiris in Pakistan were not allowed to vote,” he says.
Starting as their assistant manager, Mr Shah served with BAT for 30 years, and six years as the company’s Chairman. In 1984, he took an early retirement. He was also posted in Dhaka, Chittagong and Karachi. Sharing his experiences of working in Dhaka and Chittagong, he says: “The Nawab of Dhaka was of Kashmiri origin, and because of that association, I received a neutral and respectable treatment,” During his tenure in Karachi, Mr Shah observed the sub-human living conditions of refugees from India in the waterlogged slums of Karachi. “There were hundreds of men, women and children lying around the railway tracks across the slums to relieve themselves. It was one of the most horrific sights of Partition that I could recall. The government paid no attention to that situation until the 1960s,” he says.
After his retirement from BAT, he worked as a policy consultant for the World Bank and Asian Development Bank for various years on energy and projects in Pakistan. He continues to take up their projects.
In 1955, Mr Shah says his father became the first Kashmiri allowed to visit Pakistan from Srinagar after Partition. In the 1960s, during General Ayub’s government, he says, Kashmiris finally became eligible for allotment of evacuee property on the condition that they would surrender that property if their homeland became a part of India. “During this time, Sheikh Abdullah paid a goodwill visit to Pakistan to improve ties with India, after consulting with Jawaharlal Nehru. One of my cousins was in that delegation. Shortly after his arrival in Pakistan, we heard news of Nehru’s demise, which was an unfortunate blow to the purpose of that visit, which was also lost. In Nehru’s time, Kashmir was given a special status. It retained its position as a State and had its own Prime Minister.”
“Kashmiris suffer a perpetual state of statelessness and the government of Azad Kashmir in Muzaffarabad is only theoretical. In order to write a letter to my family in Srinagar, I had to send the letter to a third country for postage. I saw many refugees without any food or shelter from Poonch settling in Wah and Rawalpindi. I could have chosen India but there was this euphoria over having a new homeland and all the promises made, so I opted for Pakistan in a euphoria of hope that we could go home when we want to.”
Mr Shah was allowed to visit Srinagar for the first time during Nehru’s government in India when Bakhshi Ghulam Muhammad was the Prime Minister of Kashmir, he remembers.
He was married in 1958 to his wife through an arrangement by the Afghan royal family they were friends with in Srinagar. He has four children, educated in Karachi and abroad, and settled in the United States and the United Arab Emirates, nowadays. Mr Shah resides in Karachi with his wife nowadays.
Sharing his final thoughts, Mr Shah says: “Srinagar to me is paradise on earth. I’ve travelled all over the world but have not found a place like it. I compare the Kashmiris to the Jews, being driven away from their homeland for God knows how long. “Every invader that has come to this land has inflicted persecution upon the Kashmiris and forced them out of their homes. Kashmiris did not get the benefits a lot of other communities did as a result of Partition. The way it was done was most criminal, it need not have been done this way. Partition to me is the largest religious ethnic cleansing and displacement in world history, which was dismissed by the British as a casual thought. I have not seen anything more horrific than this in the history of the world.”

Arghwani Begum was born on 2nd January, 1922 at the Princely State of Sahaspur in Uttar Pradesh. Her mother, Ms Ghafoorunisa was a purdah-observing home-maker. Her father, Mr Samiullah Khan was a Governor of the Princely State of Sahaspur with 22 villages in the Bijnor district under his possession and supervision. Residents of the villages were mainly Muslim, Hindu and Christian families and most of them were farmers, she recalls. “Seasonal crops were grown in the villages with mainly rice, sugarcane, pulses and sesame from what I’ve seen. A portion of the harvest would come to my father. That was our family’s main source of income,” she says. The irrigation system for the lands at Sahaspur was well-based. Each village in Sahaspur had its own well.
She grew up with three sisters at their haveli (mansion) in Sahaspur. Arghwami Begum is the youngest. Electricity came to Sahaspur in 1934, when Arghwani Begum was 10 years old. “Before electricity arrived in our area, we used to have oil-powered fans,” she recalls.
Their haveli was segregated into mardana (male) and zanana (female) sections including the living rooms, dining areas and the kitchens, she recalls. “Men and women living in the house were not allowed to trespass into each other’s sections,” she says. The same rules applied to the servants and the maids, she says. There was a separate building for guests within the haveli and stables for the elephants and the horses as well, and a garage for cars. Food used to be made by the cooks. “We used to have both male and female cooks assigned to the dining areas. The men used to eat outside mainly, while the women ate inside,” she recalls. Copper pans and utensils were mainly used for cooking. “On the first or second of every month, they’d be electroplated,” Arghwani Begum’s clothes, shoes and other household amenities mainly came from Delhi and Muradabad. Jewellers from Delhi used to come to Sahaspur to sell gold and diamond necklaces and earrings as well, she says.
Recalling her early childhood days, Arghwani Begum says she was overtly fond of climbing the trees. “I used to get together with my friends and climb the falsa and the morus trees and pluck the fruits.” She recalls having many dolls and playing with her friends. “Sometimes we would marry the dolls and enact a proper Indian wedding in their honour. Our mothers used to stitch the wedding clothes for the dolls,” she recalls. Most of Arghwani Begum’s childhood friends were daughters of farmers from all ethnic and religious backgrounds who used to visit her haveli with their parents quite often, especially during harvest seasons and crops distribution days. “Before I entered my teens, I was officially a boy with no purdah restrictions,” she says.
She learnt to read and write in Urdu at home. “We used wooden boards to write in Urdu. We’d use two types of bamboo pens, the ones with flat nibs was used for writing alphabets and the ones with narrow nibs were used for punctuation marks and dots,” she recounts. Arghwani Begum received her early and advanced religious schooling at home as well. She never went to an academic school of learning. “My father was against it. I grew up on Maulana Ashraf Ali Thanvi’s compilation of Islamic teachings in Urdu called the Bahishti Zewar and the novels of Maulana Nazir Ahmad Dehlvi,” she says.
In 1935, Arghwani Begum and her family went on their first annual pilgrimage to Mecca in Saudi Arabia on ship via Karachi. “I used to run around in the ship a lot. We were at sea for 10 days before reaching Mecca. We completed the pilgrimage at Mecca and Medina, and then went to Jeddah. We stayed there for about three months and returned to Karachi via Jeddah,” she says.
In 1943, she was married into a family from Delhi. “It was a three-month long wedding considering the time-consuming journeys on elephants. The barat stayed at our haveli for seven days,” she recalls.
By 1947, Arghwani Begum, mother of two children, a daughter and a son, was pregnant with her third child. Recalling events leading up to Partition, she said Hindu-Muslim communal tensions had begun to escalate after May 1940, when the Pakistan resolution was passed. “Before that, there was lot of unity and trust between the Hindus and Muslims. We began to see the effects of the resolution when fighting started to erupt in the villages of Sahaspur,” she says.
She was 25 years old and at Rang Mehal in Delhi when Partition was announced. She was in her eighth or ninth month of pregnancy. “I really didn’t have any clear understanding of what is going on when our boxes were getting packed with valuables and necessities. My family told me that we are moving out of the haveli and nothing else,” she recalls.
They set out from Sahaspar in the family’s motor vehicles with her children, mother-in-law, husband, sister-in-law, uncles and their families for the Purana Qila (Old Fort) of Delhi. “At the Fort, we didn’t have a roof to sit under as there were so many families there and it was raining immensely. One of the families at the camp, in charge of pegging tents saw us and immediately pegged a tent around us. Arghwani Begum spent the night there and the next morning went into labour. She gave birth to her third child, a son, at the Old Fort migrant camp at Delhi, a day after Partition. Arghwani Begum’s sister-in-law had started crying incessantly after holding her new-born nephew “but I didn’t register why”, she recalls. “There were no clothes for the baby. He was draped in one of my daughter’s frocks,” she says.
They stayed at the Old Fort for two days and carried on to the Nizamuddin Railway Station in Delhi in the army jeeps that were expected to pick them up. “At the station, while everyone was worried about having something to eat before the train departed, I wanted to get on the train immediately. I hadn’t eaten for nearly three days but had no hunger for food. I just wanted the journey to end,” she says.
During her journey to Lahore from Delhi that started on the 17th of August, her train made stops at various stations. Recalling a night’s stay at the Amroha Railway Stop, she says lots of people got off the train in desperation to get water and eatables for the journey but never returned. “At some stations that were downhill, we saw people from the hilly areas rushing towards our train with food and drinks for the refugees for the rest of the journey. It was a relief to see that but I still didn’t have the heart to eat or drink anything,” she says. As her train continued to move, Arghwani Begum witnessed the massacre of Sikh passengers in a train passing by theirs in the opposite direction. “There were men climbing and entering that train with swords and knives. I saw the sudden commotion and heard their screams and cries of panic. I also witnessed men jumping off that train with their women and girls. It was horrifying.” she recounts.
Her train finally made it to the Wagah border on the 20th of August but it was not the end of the ordeal as our train had come under attack too. “It was so sudden. We immediately sealed shut the windows of our train with whatever we could get our hands on. My baby almost fainted due to lack of Oxygen in our berth. One of the male helpers in the train helped my baby get some air through the train’s main entrance while the killing spree lasted for an uncertain period. There was a lot of people, especially children from many berths of that train had been killed. I saw their bloodied bodies when we finally got out of the train when the assailants had left,” she says.
From Wagah, Arghwani Begum and her family (mother-in-law, sister-in-law and children) moved to the refugee camp at Walton. They were picked up hours later and shifted to the Davis School which had been temporarily converted into a residence for migrants in poor physical shape. She was reunited with her husband and parents three days later. “They’d discovered our whereabouts through announcements on loud speakers at the railway station,” she recalls. From Davis School, Arghwani Begum’s family moved to her daughter’s future husband’s uncle’s house in Model Town where they stayed for two-three days.
From there, she moved to a small independent house in Model Town’s C-Block, once occupied by the Hindu families. “There was a 10-kanal vacant plot next to that house which used to belong to an affluent Hindu landlord. My husband purchased the plot and we had a big house built on it for my children,” she says.
In the 1950s, her family was allotted some lands at Dera Ismail Khan against their property at Sahashpur by the Pakistani government. “We had no roots or business in Dera Ismail Khan and therefore used those lands for agricultural purposes only,” she says. Her mother-in-law expired in 1971 followed by her husband who died of heart failure in 1975. The couple has two sons and four daughters. Two of her daughters are educated and settled in the US. “My husband had left my sons on a solid footing and taught them all there is to know about leading a responsible life. They practically took care of everything after his demise,” she says.
In 1980, she visited her birthplace in India with two of her daughters Nabahat and Sabahat on train. Her daughter says, “She had practically started shaking and crying as we approached her house. It was very intense for her,”
Arghwani Begum currently lives at her husband’s house with her maid, one of her sons, daughter-in-law, grand-children, and great-grand-children in Lahore nowadays.

Geoffrey Douglas Langlands was born on 21st of October, 1917 to a British family in Hull, Yorkshire in England.
His father worked for an Anglo-American company and his mother was a folk dance instructor at a small school. Mr Langlands was raised with his twin brother John Alexander Langlands. Both the boys were named by their mother.
“Geoffrey and John were my parents’ favorite names. Alexandar Douglas was the name of my maternal grandfather. Since my twin brother was ten minutes older than me, Alexander went to him, and Douglas became my middle name,” he says.
Mr Langlands’ father died as a result of the 1918 flu epidemic that had killed over 20 million people worldwide. After their father’s death, the Langlands moved to their mother’s parents’ home in Bristol where he was raised with his brother by their mother and maternal grandparents. Geoffrey’s mother died of cancer in 1930, and went into the care of their grandfather eventually, who’d passed away a year later. “Our father died when we were one year old. Our mother died when we were twelve, and we lost our grandfather when we turned thirteen. There was a lot of death in our family from a very early age,” he recounts.
In July 1935, Geoffrey completed his A levels, and took up teaching science and mathematics to second grade students at a small school in London the same year. He taught for nearly four years. “In my fourth year, I was promoted to teaching third grade students,” he says.
During this time, news of World War II caught Geoffrey’s attention. “I was preparing to enter the fourth year of teaching and then came September 1939. I was sitting by the radio all by myself when I heard Churchill say that Hitler has taken over Poland, and as of 11am, Britain is at war with Germany,” he recounts. “I never did anything without discussing things with my brother. Once, I saw an advertisement in the English paper asking for persons to join to become engineers in the air force. My brother advised against it since our family had no money whatsoever. He was not around at the time WW II was announced. Without telling anyone I made the decision, and headed straight to the recruitment office to enroll as an ordinary solider,” he recounts.
Mr Langlands joined the British army in 1939, and in 1942, he was recruited as commando and fought against the Germans at the Dieppe beach in France organized by the chief of operations Lord Mountbatten.
In January 1944, Geoffrey joined the British Indian army and was posted at Bangalore where he was made in charge of selecting, recruiting and training young men to become officers in the army. “I was under training at Kent. One day, three British colonels of the Indian army came to the place where we were being trained to become army officers. They wanted volunteers for selecting applicants to the British Indian army. I was the only one with that kind of experience, and was therefore chosen for the job. I was in a unit for interviewing, testing and training the boys applying to be officers in the army. It was an important task and I was engaged in the unit for two years,” he says.
Sharing his experience of the initial years in India, Mr Langlands says the Quit India campaign by the Congress was gaining a lot of momentum and the British soldiers could sense the tensions building up. “To quit India was something impossible, especially when the war was on. We were under strict orders to stay at our posts till the end of the war. There was no question of going anywhere else around the world,” he says.
In early 1947, Mr Langlands and his unit came under the supervision of Lord Mountbatten for the second time, now as the last viceroy of British India. “He was in charge of all of us, and it was evident that he was in a hurry from day one in India as well. We used to call him the whirlwind man,” Geoffrey says. “The first thing he did was give names of volunteers to stay on for one year after the actual independence. I was also selected as one of the volunteers since I’d already been engaged in the task of recruiting and testing potential army offices in India,” he recounts.
“We had to add one short paragraph in a lot of documents stating ‘do you want to join the Pakistan army or the Indian army?’ Mountbatten made the Indian army in charge of the task, and there was a lot of suspicion that he did this to delay whether young ones wanting to join the Pakistan army would have the choice to make the selection,” he recounts. “However, when the lists were finally issued by the Indian army, the young ones had the choice to join Pakistan army,”
After Geoffrey’s recruitment as the volunteer trainer during Partition, he was posted at Dehradun, where he trained potential officers for both the armies up to December 1947,” he says. “In the meantime, in July, I was told that I must travel to Rawalpindi at once by train because I’d been posted to one year in the Pakistan army, and the young men at Dehradun wanting to join the Pakistan army were to arrive at Rawalpindi from where we would take them to the military academy in Kakul for training.”
Geoffrey took a train to Rawalpindi to make arrangements for the young men’s arrival in the city. When he reached Rawalpindi, he found the city deserted and found the army officers’ mess after all day of inquiring. “There was only one cook in the mess, and everyone else had gone off to India I was told. There was no office for the young men from Dehradun to gather at, and no one to receive them there,” he recounts.
At the time of Partition, Mr Langlands describes being on the railway for route back and forth between India and Pakistan for ten days as an officer of the Pakistan army.
His journey began from Rawalpindi to the tribal areas around the Himalayas by train, to make a farewell visit to his infantry there. Upon reaching the Gujrat railway station, the station master requested him to vacate the train for passengers in the train behind them. “The passengers were Indian army troops bound to India. We stayed in the station for an hour, and then moved on. When we got to the Lahore station, it was almost empty. The top man was there with few others but no trains were moving. The train that we had vacated for the Indian troops was waiting at the Lahore railway station. The station manager asked me to guard the train for the night as there was a lot of trouble in Lahore, and I kept guard of it the whole night,” he says.
The next morning, Geoffrey set off from Lahore. He had gotten half way to Amritsar when their train was stopped a small station near a village. “The villagers told us that we can’t go ahead in the train tonight as there was a lot of trouble in Amritsar. We took refuge in a big bus and there were about 20 Indian officers with me. They were talking to each other and saying somebody has to go out and find out from the train guard on what’s happening. None of them seemed clear on whether they should go. I volunteered to check things on their behalf,” he recounts.
Geoffrey met with the train guard who took him to the station master’s office. “We’d walked down the platform and halfway to the station master’s office, some people started firing machine guns at us from nowhere. I shouted at them: Stop fighting! Stop firing!”
“They were used to the English voice and they stopped firing. I went down to the steps and shouted don’t fire until you can see who you’re firing at. When we got to the station master’s office, he was lying down, having been shot dead inside the office. The assistant was sitting at his desk shivering, and asked what was happening. We told him the train is not going to move until daylight comes,”
About mid-day, the next day Geoffrey and the Indian troops managed to get to Amritsar railway station. “The military guarding the trains at the station were in Pakistani army uniforms, getting ready to return to Lahore. The Indian people knowing that I was from the Pakistan army told me that they no longer want the Pakistani military to be here but allowed me to continue my journey to the Himalayas. Recounting the journey, he witnessed people firing at each other indiscriminately and indescribable insanity. “At times, when people would rush towards the train, the men with the machine gun would ask me, “Should I fire at them?” I was an ordinary passenger in the train trying to keep things calm but the question kept coming up throughout the journey,” he says.
Mr Langlands stayed with his infantry in the Himalayas for nearly four days that was quite shocked to hear about what was going on down the hills.
“Gradually all the train crosses were cut off, and I had to spend three-four days there [to regain focus].”
In September 1947, Mr Langlands took the train to New Delhi from Peshawar [express service]. There he was told to coordinate with the unit in charge of sending migrants to Pakistan. Like most migrants to Pakistan, Mr Langlands was required to get clearance from the Pakistan desk of Delhi. They had to clear some payments and I had no problem with that. From Delhi, I took the emergency flight by air to Lahore. You were only allowed 20 pounds of luggage. There were no seats in the plane as everyone was sitting on the floor to accommodate more people,” he recounts.
“The idea of giving any sort of power had no effect on me but the turbulence continued for several months after Partition,” he says.
In December 1947, the young men of the Pakistani army in Dehradun were officially transferred to the Pakistan army. During the same time, most British officers were asked to leave Pakistan by the new government prior to the completion of their yearlong contract with the British government. “Jinnah spoke strongly with the prime minister against letting all the British soldiers leave. He directed him to find out what all the British officers had been doing in the past four months and see which ones are worth keeping. So they agreed,” he says.
From January 1st 1948, a two-year contract was given to those who’d done moderately good work, and those who were really good at what they’ve been doing were given a contract of three years with the Pakistan government. Mr Langlands retired from the army as Major after a decade of training Pakistani army officers. He resumed his career in teaching and joined the Aitchison College for Boys where he taught in Lahore for 25 years. To read more about his life and career in Pakistan, please visit: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geoffrey_Langlands.
Sharing his thoughts on the Fall of Dhaka, Mr Langlands says that from the beginning of training of the boys in military units at Dehradun and Kohat, he had sensed aspiring officers from West Pakistan didn’t like going to East Pakistan at all. Every time I went to East Pakistan, I saw the army officers weren’t doing very well there. After 20 West Pakistanis had applied to become army officers, as mandatory practice, a small group of them was sent to East Pakistan for six weeks twice a year. The first group was sent in December,” he recalls.
East Pakistan [Bengal] had been supplying items to the capital of West Bengal through Calcutta or growing things and sending them to Calcutta for several decades. “Now they had been cut off from that route, and couldn’t go there. They had good growth in all sorts of things and plenty of water but found no support from the government. The capital of East Pakistan had a university that was just about the worse in all of Pakistan and there was so much of poverty. The government was really not interested in investing there. The Bengalis considered themselves a colony still being ruled by Britain, and had fairly strong reasons right from the start to break away as separate from West Pakistan,” Mr Langlands says.
Sharing his final thoughts on Partition, Mr Langlands feels the bloodshed and violence that resulted in the deaths and displacement of millions was due to poor leadership decisions of the last viceroy of British India. “Mountbatten was told to get the final independence by August 1948 but he had it done in August 1947. It was typical of him. Otherwise, millions of lives could’ve been spared. It could’ve been done more peacefully and many wars that followed could’ve been avoided,” he says.
Mr Langlands nowadays lives in Lahore at the Langlands House in Aitchison College. “I was seeing two ladies when I was young and each would ask me whom will I marry and when. I’d tell them not until the war is over.” Mr Langlands is 99 years old today, and he never married.

Maryam Babar [name at birth Maryam Haqqani] was born on December 6th 1941 at Hyderabad Deccan to a Scottish-Indian political family. Maryam was called Munni at home by her family when she was small. Her father, Mohammed Intisaruddin Haqqani was a powerful landlord, cousin of Laiq Ali, the prime minister of Hyderabad Deccan at the time, and brother-in-law of physicist Raziuddin Siddiqui. Her mother, Eva Matthew Watt was a homemaker, niece of Sir Robert Watson Watt, well-known for his invention of the radar during World War II.
Mrs Babar’s parents met at the Glasgow University and were married a few months later. Narrating the tale of their marriage, she says: “My mother was from a deeply religious Church of Scotland background, and her parents’ only child, and my father was a practicing Sufi Muslim. My mother left Scotland in 1935 and married my father in 1936. She married a Muslim Indian against her family’s wishes and it took them a while to accept their marriage,” she recounts.
Sharing the story of how Mrs Babar was named Maryam by her mother, she says: “My mother had a dream that she was pregnant with me and in the dream she was instructed to read the Chapter of Maryam [Mary] from the Qur’an until the day she delivers the baby. Without telling anyone, she picked up the book and started reading the chapter, and I was therefore named Maryam,” she says.
Mrs Babar was raised with an elder sister and younger brother at the Goshamahal in Hyderabad. Her family, she says, were the jagirdars of the State with their own coins and currency, system of slavery, judiciary and postal system that were independent of the political apparatus of the government of the Hyderabad princely state.
Sharing her earliest memories of growing up in Hyderabad, Mrs Babar says that the smell of jasmine invokes her childhood. “In the summers, our beds would be covered in jasmine flowers to keep the room fragrant and cool. Every time I see or smell jasmine, I’m taken back to those nights in Hyderabad, just before bedtime,” she recounts.
Another memory of her life in Hyderabad was taking walks with their aya in the evenings and playing in the vicinity of one of her father’s textile factories and witnessing work at the gigantic sugar plantation near the factory. “We used to make footballs out of the massive lumps of sugar in the plantation,” she recounts. Breakfast used to be the favorite meal of the day for Mrs Babar. The breakfast menu included khichdi, square parathas, khagina [egg and onion curry], ghee-fried minced mutton, with khatta [imli paani and fried onion dip].
Maryam’s maternal grandfather and maternal uncle fought in the First World War and Second World War respectively. Mrs Babar vaguely remembers watching her mother glued to the radio listening to the BBC for news during the Second World War. “It used to be a very tense time for her since her brother was fighting in that war. We were not allowed to utter a single word when the radio was on,” she remembers. The languages spoken at home before Partition were Deccani Urdu, Persian and English.
Mrs Babar and her siblings had no idea about the implications of Partition. “From 1947 until the police action in Hyderabad in 1949, we didn’t notice any change in our lives but our elders did and that may have affected us at some sub-conscious level,” she says. Recalling the game she used to play with her cousins, called Pakistanis versus Indians [modeled around the American game of Cowboys versus Indians], she says: “Everyone would want to be an Indian, not a Pakistani. Pakistanis were the enemies and they would always lose,” she recounts. “One day, my father saw us play and say demeaning things about Pakistan. He sat us down and told us that Pakistan, is a country for Muslims, it is not our enemy. That was my first realization of Partition and after that, it felt okay to be on the Pakistani side of the team but it continued to lose in the game,” she remembers.
In 1947, Mrs Babar and her siblings were taken to Scotland by their mother to meet with their ailing grandfather. Her strongest memory of stay in Scotland was her refrain from taking any sugar when offered. “During World War II, there was shortage of food supplies and everything was being rationed, including sugar supplies. Our mother strictly forbade us to waste lumps of sugar in tea and milk. Her lectures had such a profound impact on us that we’d refuse to take even one lump of sugar at our grandfather’s house,” she remembers.
In 1949, Mrs Babar returned to Hyderabad and was enrolled at the Mehboobia School that was run by the British. “It is during the time at school I began to feel some tension in our city. Firstly, we were appalled at having to learn Sanskrit and Hindu greeting phrases at school when main spoken languages of Hyderabad used to be Urdu and Persian. Secondly, we started hearing news of “police action” and of “Hyderabad going under siege,” recounts Mrs Babar. “I heard many horror stories of the gorkhas wreaking havoc, raping, killing and looting women and children,” she says.
One night, thousands of rioters gathered around the Goshamahal and started chanting ominous slogans. Mrs Babar and her entire family were inside. Mrs Babar and her siblings were instructed to sleep on the mattresses at the landing of the mansion, the only place that did not have any windows. “We were huddled on to the mattresses and made to keep quiet. I heard my parents talking with each other about a pistol my mother was carrying. I remember my father asking her how she is going to defend herself with one pistol against thousands of angry people outside. She’d told him that the pistol is not for them but for killing the children just in case the mob breaches the mansion. I don’t want my children to die at the hands of the rioters,” Mrs Babar recounts her mother saying. “I asked my mother about the pistol decades later and she was quite surprised to know that I’d heard her intentions to kill us at some point if things went bad,” she says.
Back in 1949 in the meantime, Laiq Ali, the prime minister of Hyderabad Deccan went under house arrest. “My mother was out shopping one day and her maid’s son met with her and told her to inform my father not to go home as the police is on its way to arrest him,” she recounts.
Mrs Babar’s uncle managed to escape his house wearing a burqa and was flown out of Hyderabad Deccan by the Australian explorer and pilot Sidney Cotton. Mrs Babar’s mother after hearing the news of her husband’s pending arrest went to the post office and sent a telegram to her uncle Robert in Gaelic to intervene and help them leave Hyderabad safely. He had a great deal of influence because of his famed invention of the radar. He’d immediately contacted Krishna Menon, the newly appointed Indian high commissioner in the UK and advised him to help his only niece and her family to leave Hyderabad unharmed. Krishna Menon rang up Jawaharlal Nehru and Nehru rang up General Chaudhry, the Indian army chief in charge of the Hyderabad siege, who gave him special instructions to pick up our family and escort us to Bombay,” Mrs Babar recounts. “The General personally came to pick us up, and he told us that things were so bad that even his own regiment didn’t know that he is helping us escape Hyderabad. We left India with my father’s briefcase only. He drove us to the railway station, and boarded us on a special train to Bombay where we checked in at the Taj Hotel for a day. From Bombay, we took the evening flight on one of the Dakotas and flown to London. The year was early 1950,” Mrs Babar recounts. Mrs Babar and her family stayed in London for two years and then relocated to Karachi in 1952.
“As Hyderabadis, we were living in this fantasy bubble that India is one country and Pakistan is one country but Hyderabad will always remain Hyderabad since it was the largest and independent princely state in India at the time. It wasn’t a question of us leaving India and coming to Pakistan. In our heads, we thought that we have left Hyderabad and settled in Karachi. When our father announced [in London] that we are going to Karachi, he didn’t say we are going to Pakistan, instead he told us since we had a fairly good time in Karachi, we are going to go settle there. From a child’s point of view, we were not leaving our country to be in another country,” Mrs Babar says.
Mrs Babar resumed her schooling in Karachi at the Saint Joseph School, completing her O levels in 1957 followed by Senior Cambridge in 1959 from Saint Joseph College. Her father was elected the chairman of the Pakistan Industrial Development Corporation (PIDC) and he built the Karachi Shipyard with the help of German engineers in the 1950s. He also set up textile mills in East Pakistan and sugar mills in Nowshera, Khyber Pakhtunkhwa.
Sharing thoughts of settling in Karachi, Mrs Babar says that it was fairly easy for her father to get over the nostalgia of leaving behind Hyderabad. “He took giving up his homeland as something that was inevitable and he strongly believed in letting go of the inevitable. My mother on the other hand, couldn’t get over it all her life. She used to compare each and every aspect of life in Karachi with what we used to have in Hyderabad,” she says. Sharing the effects of leaving Hyderabad on herself, she says: “I haven’t been able to have a hearty breakfast ever since I left Hyderabad with my family.”
Mrs Babar met her future husband, CSP officer Bashir Babar, during German language classes in 1960 and married him three months later in December 1960 at Peshawar, Khyber Pakhtunkhwa where she lives with him nowadays. They have three daughters and a son [who passed away a decade ago].
Mrs Babar gave birth to her second daughter in an Indian army jeep in New Delhi during the war in September 1965. “For our own safety, the Pakistani diplomats were incarcerated during the war in New Delhi where my husband was posted in 1962. It was our first international posting. I was helped in the delivery by Dr Mohini through an emergency C-section. She was shocked to see my condition. My daughter was due on the 6th of September but my body had become numb and non-responsive. I couldn’t register any labor pains. I’d lost a lot of weight in only a month’s time,” Mrs Babar recounts.
When her daughter was three days old, Mrs Babar was allowed by the Indian government to fly to Karachi as a result of an unexpected opportunity. “There was a Pan-American Airline that was scheduled to make a brief stop at Karachi. There was an Indian national that had to be picked up from Karachi as well, so I was sent off on to the plane. When the plane started to move, the pilot made an announcement that the plane would go directly to Beirut and will not be stopping at Karachi. I went in a state of panic with my three-day old daughter and immediately got myself off the plane. I ended up spending another six weeks in Delhi after that incident,” she says.
After her return to Karachi in 1967, Mrs Babar and her family travelled to Brazil, Afghanistan, Lebanon, Iran, Australia, Germany and then finally India in 1992. She vividly remembers her husband’s posting in Beirut and escaping several assassination attempts and bombings in the city during their stay. “For three years, we lived through the Israeli occupation and the intifada, and witnessed many families we knew lose their lives as their homes were blown to bits. My husband was almost assassinated with a bomb planted under his bed that we managed to find out about well in time. On many days, we didn’t know whether he was alive or dead,” recounts Mrs Babar.
In 1996, Mrs Babar settled in Peshawar permanently at her husband’s home. She started her own farming business in 1988 and continues to do so today. “We built a farmhouse in 1988, located about 2 kilometers from the city. I learnt to speak fluent Pashto and carry out all affairs of family and business in the Pashto language,” she says. Mrs Babar’s father passed away in 1972 and her mother in 1994. Both her parents are buried in Karachi.
Sharing her final thoughts on Partition and being a child of the diaspora, Mrs Babar quotes her father: “We are a victim of our own spite. Partition is a result of our own personal and racial prejudices.” She adds: “My mother was conscious of the fact that her people would never accept us as Scots so she’d made a conscious decision to raise us as Indians. Now, when I say that I’m from Hyderabad Deccan, people automatically assume I’m from India since I can’t possibly be from Hyderabad Deccan if I’m not an Indian national. This is the dilemma we face. It is a terrible thing to be a refugee. When you are forced to leave what has been your family’s home for generations, for centuries, the place where you were born and made to think it’s yours forever, you remain a refugee for the rest of your life. It never goes away. I’m living in a home that I absolutely love but I’ll always know that this is not where my roots are, as we say in Urdu mitti bulati hai [the motherland beckons],”